To the last Stalinist paradise on Earth
Backpackers are always looking for places less traveled, a sort of perpetually self-contradicting collective trait. But some destinations remain exotic and are sufficiently difficult to reach that they retain a sort of social cachet.
One such destination is North Korea. Described by George Bush Junior as evil, and by the New York Times as the place where the poverty is so extreme that the villagers can only survive by eating grass, it certainly sounds exotic.
This is all the more true if you listen to a BBC report from 2003 that described gas chambers used by the North Koreans to deal with dissenters. This hinted at a very unusual alternative holiday destination:
In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22—North Korea's largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held. Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them. Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings...
Accurate or not, there may be a good reason why North Korea isn't a prime honeymoon spot.
Nonetheless, the People's Republic does allow some visitors in, albeit always with a wary attitude. So getting there is a difficult quandary. The travel literature is full of people describing how they managed to get in, usually after deceiving the North Koreans of their true purpose, which is frequently to expose the horrors of life under the system.
One young American teacher, Scott Fisher, based in Seoul, managed it by pretending to be interested in the Cultural Festival that the Koreans put on around the time of the World Cup in the South (a source of some bitter envy to the North). The truth is, the North Koreans do like foreign currency and if you want to visit, and are sufficiently discreet about your political position, you can. Just use the official channels.
We join Scott Fisher, our guide for the “Journey into Kimland” as he patronizingly puts it, at the main visitor's room overlooking the security strip between the two halves of Korea. Scott takes the opportunity to talk with one of his People's Republic mandatory guides, acknowledging that he is now able to see that the buildings on the North Korean side are indeed real buildings: one of the stories circulating on the Southern side was that they were all sham facades.
While looking over the area from the balcony I told Mr. Huk the story I had heard about the building during my first tour on the Southern side. About how we weren't actually standing in a “real” building. His reaction was immediate and will forever serve as my personal definition of “venomous.” “Now you can see the lies! The lies of the American imperialists and their South Korean puppets!” He literally spat this out. Foam flew from his lips he was so incensed. “Someday you will discover the truth about everything! They only tell you lies! Lies!”
Scott decides, as he puts it in his holiday account, “to have a little fun.”
“Ah, yes Mr. Huk, there are many lies in the world. I hope I'm there when you discover the truth also.” ...My words had him bug-eyed with rage. Veins popped from his forehead. “Me?! It is YOU who needs to discover the truth. I already know the truth!” “There are many truths. I hope we are together when they are ALL discovered. “At this point he'd lost self-control and was right in my face, screaming in a frustrated combination of English and Korean. “You don't know what you are talking about! WE know! YOU don't know!”
“Yes, and there are some things we know that you don't. Hopefully I can be there when you find them out.” Scott replies calmly (in his account). Scott is presumably not thinking along the same lines as Martin Hart-Landsberg who wrote in Division, Reunification, and US Foreign Policy that by careful scrutiny of US policy in Asia, the true motivations could be seen as division of the peninsula. This policy set in motion separate political processes in North and South Korea that resulted in a cultural tragedy for the Korean people and turned the peninsula into a potentially explosive trouble spot. Nor does he seem to be thinking of the policy deceptions discussed by Noam Chomsky in What Uncle Sam Really Wants where he wrote:
When US forces entered Korea in 1945, they dispersed the local popular government, consisting primarily of anti-fascists who resisted the Japanese, and inaugurated a brutal repression, using Japanese fascist police and Koreans who had collaborated with them during the Japanese occupation. About 100,000 people were murdered in South Korea prior to what we call the Korean War, including 30-40,000 killed during the suppression of a peasant revolt in one small region, Cheju Island.
But Scott is right about one thing. There are a lot of different “truths” to be found in North Korea. Two Canadian historians, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, spent five years investigating archives in the US and China, and discovered the “truth” that the US had been actively developing biological weapons since the end of World War II and that it had tested these weapons in 1952 by bombing parts of North Korea and China with anthrax, encephalitis and other diseases.
At the time, the US strategy was to keep its research secret in order to camouflage germ warfare as “natural” epidemics, endemic to poor countries of the South. In China's Liaoning Province, eye-witness accounts tell of a comparable number of US plane sorties and refer to unusual concentrations of insects, particularly flies and fleas, following the bombings. Medical personnel records also note the presence of insects alien to the region and highly resistant to the cold. Following the bombings, epidemics of the plague, cholera and anthrax hit the region with a vengeance.
Be that as it may, you won't be able to see that from the DMZ. But Joe Canon, an unusually sympathetic Western visitor, described what he could see from across the Chinese side of the river, before his “Holiday in North Korea” 
:
I'm standing at the end of the bridge to North Korea. It stops here at the border, in a riot of twisted metal. Ahead of me the piers march in pairs, on across the Yalu River until they reach the other bank. This bombed-out bridge is a tourist attraction: even now, at the end of a hard winter, a steady trickle of Chinese and South Korean tourists make the walk to the end, where you can have your photo taken with North Korea as a backdrop, or gaze at it through a telescope...
The Americans bombed the bridge during the Korean War: the Chinese side is intact, but the North Koreans have left theirs in its ruined state, a monument to the destruction wreaked on their country. And to the fact that for them, the war is not over. This bridge, all concrete and girders, is a bleak enough place in winter. But what's going on beneath my feet is positively eerie. Only a few weeks ago, the river was frozen solid. Now, the thaw has begun, but only on the Chinese side. All the hot water and effluent from factories, homes and shops heats this side up. But the water on the North Korean side remains frozen, and the pack ice ends in mid-river, precisely lining the border...
How poor are the North Koreans? Do they really starve and eat grass? Until the 1980s, North Korea had been ahead of China economically. The quality of its goods was highly prized across the border. The infra-structure was superior, too, with good roads and highways. Unlike China, North Korea had successfully introduced universal literacy, free health care and education, and had never abandoned a respect for classical Korean culture. Perhaps we should wonder about some of the claims of disaster. After all, aside from the fact that grass is poisonous to humans, no one seems to be able to source the figures. Amnesty International quotes reports, Reuters quotes Amnesty. What is officially admitted, however, it that since 1994, “a series of natural disasters and years of state-run economic mismanagement compounded by the loss of preferential trade with the former Soviet Union and China in the early 1990s have unleashed acute food shortages leading to famine.” In December 1998, the Asia Regional Director of the World Food Program (WFP) described the situation in North Korea as a “famine in slow motion” in which the whole country appeared to be underfed.
Japan occupied Korea in 1905 and annexed it five years later. In 1945, Soviet troops entered the northern half of Korea and American troops the southern half to disarm the Japanese after their surrender.
In 1948, following the formation of the US-backed Republic of Korea in Seoul, the rival Democratic People's Republic of Korea was established in Pyongyang with Kim ll-sung, a Soviet-backed, anti-Japanese resistance leader, as its first prime minister. He became president in 1972. In June 1950, North Korean armed forces entered the South in an attempt to reunite the country by force. Chinese troops later joined them to oppose US-led United Nations forces. The Korean War ended with a truce signed in July 1953, but the two Koreas still remain technically at war.
All North Korean citizens are entitled to disability benefits and retirement allowances. Medical care is free and available at peoples' clinics throughout the country. In 1993 there were about 62,100 doctors (around 1 per 370 people). The official Infant mortality rate in 2003 was 26 deaths per 1,000 live births.
Nowadays there is great interest in the North Korean nuclear program. But it was only in September 1991, under North Korean pressure, that President George Bush (Sr.) announced the withdrawal of all US nuclear weapons from the South.
Despite being an excellent opportunity to see two political systems—communist totalitarianism and capitalist totalitarianism—malfunctioning side by side, the Demilitarized Zone still earns its reputation as one of the world's most dangerous places. Step out of line and you could be shot. But better than that, hang about a bit and the next world war could start here.